The Blue Nowhere

problem is that you don’t have to protect yourself against fools. You have to protect yourself against people like me.”
    “Well, once you’d broken in why didn’t you tell the company about the security flaws? Do a white hat?”
    White hats were hackers who cracked into computer systems and then pointed out the security flaws to their victims. Sometimes for theglory of it, sometimes for money. Sometimes even because they thought it was the right thing to do.
    Gillette shrugged. “It’s their problem. That guy said that it couldn’t be done. I just wanted to see if I could.”
    “Why?”
    Another shrug. “Curious.”
    “Why’d the feds come down on you so hard?” Anderson asked. If a hacker doesn’t disrupt business or try to sell what he steals the FBI rarely even investigates, let alone refers a case to the U.S. attorney.
    It was the warden who answered. “The reason is the DoD.”
    “Department of Defense?” Anderson asked, glancing at a gaudy tattoo on Gillette’s arm. Was that an airplane? No, it was a bird of some kind.
    “It’s bogus,” Gillette muttered. “Complete bullshit.”
    The cop looked at the warden, who explained, “The Pentagon thinks he wrote some program or something that cracked the DoD’s latest encryption software.”
    “Their Standard 12?” Anderson gave a laugh. “You’d need a dozen supercomputers running full-time for six months to crack a single e-mail.”
    Standard 12 had recently replaced DES—the Defense Encryption Standard—as the state-of-the-art encryption software for the government. It was used to encrypt secret data and messages. The encryption program was so important to national security that it was considered a munition under the export laws.
    Anderson continued, “But even if he did crack something encoded with Standard 12, so what? Everybody tries to crack encryptions.”
    There was nothing illegal about this as long as the encrypted document wasn’t classified or stolen. In fact, many software manufacturers dare people to try to break documents encrypted with their programs and offer prizes to anybody who can do so.
    “No,” Gillette explained. “The DoD’s saying that I cracked into their computer, found out something about how Standard 12 works and then wrote some script that decrypts the document. It can do it in seconds.”
    “Impossible,” Anderson said, laughing. “Can’t be done.”
    Gillette said, “That’s what I told them. They didn’t believe me.”
    Yet as Anderson studied the man’s quick eyes, hollow beneath dark brows, hands fidgeting impatiently in front of him, he wondered if maybe the hacker actually had written a magic program like this. Anderson himself couldn’t have done it; he didn’t know anybody who could. But after all, the cop was here now, hat in hand, because Gillette was a wizard, the term used by hackers to describe those among them who’ve reached the highest levels of skill in the Machine World.
    There was a knock on the door and the guard let two men inside. The first one, fortyish, had a lean face, dark blond hair swept back and frozen in place with hairspray. Honest-to-God sideburns too. He wore a cheap gray suit. His overwashed white shirt was far too big for him and was halfway untucked. He glanced at Gillette without a splinter of interest. “Sir,” he said to the warden in a flat voice. “I’m Detective Frank Bishop, state police, Homicide.” He nodded an anemic greeting to Anderson and fell silent.
    The second man, a little younger, much heavier, shook the warden’s hand then Anderson’s. “Detective Bob Shelton.” His face was pockmarked from childhood acne.
    Anderson didn’t know anything about Shelton but he’d talked to Bishop and had mixed feelings concerning his involvement in the case Anderson was here about. Bishop was supposedly a wizard in his own right though his expertise lay in tracking down killers and rapists in hard-scrabble neighborhoods like the Oakland waterfront, Haight-Ashbury and the infamous San Francisco Tenderloin. Computer Crimes wasn’t authorized—or equipped—to run a homicide like this one without somebody from the Violent Crimes detail but, after several brief phone discussions with Bishop, Anderson was not impressed. The homicide cop seemed humorless and distracted and, more troubling, knew zero about computers.
    Anderson had also heard that Bishop himself didn’t even want to be working with Computer Crimes. He’d been lobbying for